⚡ The Biggest Surprise When I Niched Down, The One-man Content OS (that gets 107M impressions)

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This is Growth Currency⚡ #62 — your weekly dose of newsletter cheat codes 🎮

A special welcome to the 30 newest members of the Growth Currency⚡ newsletter community, including Minnow, Jesse, Kat, Stephen, Victor, Henry, Jessica, Cathy, Lindsey and Lisa—to name a few!

Thank you for giving me a little bit of space in you inbox. 🙏

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How To Unlock Ideas: The Niche Key 🗝️

I was scared. For a long time:

"I don't want to write about one thing. I like all the things."

The idea of just writing about one topic scared the 💩 out of me: I did not want to be confined to a niche prison. What if I wanted to write about something different?

Well last week, after some gentle coercion by a peer, I finally announced I was "niching down" with this newsletter. (If you missed it, read about it here).

My finger was trembling. Nervous as hell. (Cue climactic music)...

Then I hit 'send'.

The email went out—and it was a complete unlock.

It's true what they say: "constraints unlock creativity."

Here's how accepting the constraint of niching down opened the floodgates of ideas and opportunities.

Quick story: I run a lot. It's my highly-leveraged meditation/fitness/ideation session. Last week after I hit send on the email announcing my newfound "focus", I went for a run—and ideas began flowing.

I'll often get ideas while running, but this was different: they wouldn't stop. I was recording each idea as quickly and often as they came. My minutes-per-kilometer took a backseat to my ideas-per-minute.

I had ideas about...
→ newsletter lead magnets
→ newsletter courses
→ newsletter podcasts
→ newsletter guides & templates
→ newsletter growth strategies
→ newsletter...—you get the picture.

My Otter.ai app was getting a better workout than my legs.

[sidenote: use a voice-to-text app for ideas when exercising. Best hack ever.]

The point is this → honing in on the focus of your content is NEVER a bad thing. At worst, you discover you don't like a topic as much as you thought and pivot to something else.

At best, you become the go-to expert in that niche.

How To Figure Out Your Niche

Last year I wrote an Atomic Essay titled Stop niching down already. I argued that a niche can feel suffocating if you're not ready to commit (clearly, I was not ready).

Steph Smith provides some advice for those feeling similarly, particularly on this point:

Focus on the how, not the what. How can you deliver differently than others? Can you add in some branded infographics to an otherwise dry subject? Can you inject some humor into an unnecessarily serious topic? You don’t have to niche down, just deliver differently and stand out a bit.

Justin Welsh offers a more zeroed-in approach his Operating System course:

The #1 problem I see when people are trying to build a business on LinkedIn is that

they are not focused on a specific customer. "When you talk to everybody, you talk to nobody."

Justin provides a great example:

You may think your niche is marketing. But that's too broad. So you drill down to focus on email marketing. Great! But you could get even more targeted: email marketing for 7-figure business owners.

Now you know exactly the type of content and messaging you'll need to resonate with that audience.

(Source: The Operating System by Justin Welsh)

Safe to say I haven't drilled down to a sub-niche. And it's okay if you haven't either, but you can see how figuring out your sub-niche would really refine your focus and your messaging in a hyper-specific way.

Where are you at? Is your newsletter targeted? Are you focusing on differentiating your 'how' instead of your 'what', or are you laser-focused on a sub-niche like Justin recommends?

I'd love to hear your feedback and any challenges or questions you may have about this.

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YOUR GROWTH CURRENCY ⚡ THIS WEEK

"Knowledge is the currency of growth."

⚡ Infinite Content Ideas by Blake Emal
To grow a newsletter, you need to grow an audience. Which means you need good content. Problem is, good content ideas—like good help—can be hard to find. So use Blake's infinite Content Ideas strategy and never run out of ideas again.

⚡6 Newsletter Ideas That Make Money by Paved
You want to start a paid newsletter—but not sure what to write about? Let these 6 niches guide you 🧙‍♂️

⚡ Content OS by Justin Welsh
Justin's brand new course reveals the 4-step system he's created to generate 107M+ content impressions across LinkedIn and Twitter. It's a behind-the-scenes dive into how he plans his social content and systematizes the creation process. If you're on the fence, check out this video — Justin shares this whole system in Content OS.

[Affiliate disclosure: I'm a customer and now an affiliate because I got so much value. I've already got my Notion templates created as you'll see below 😉 ]

⚡Save To Notion — Another perk to Justin's course (above) was finding this gem of a tool for Notion. Justin uses this tool to save tweets into a Notion database. The link and tweet content get plugged right in, automatically.

⚡[Event] Why Repurposing Your Podcast Content is A Waste of Time (unless you do it like this) with Jeremy Enns (and me!)
We'll be sharing 3 unorthodox ways to repurpose your podcast content to increase engagement from your existing fans AND drive new listeners to your show. Jeremy and I will be cohosting this Twitter Space on Thursday April 7th at 11am PDT.

Hang out with us »

Jeremy is launching his 5th cohort of Podcast Marketing Academy later in April, so this your chance to get a sneak peak at the goods!

I appreciate you reading the GC⚡ newsletter this week.

If you're new here and you made it to the bottom, know that you made my day! You'll quickly learn I'm eager for feedback from you so I can deliver the best newsletter possible:

How would you rate this edition?
⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡ Electrifying!
⚡⚡⚡ A decent jolt.
⚡ Just static...

Hit reply and let me know why — I answer every one :)

And in case you missed it, here are last week's most popular links:

#1: 100+ No-Code Tools for Marketers and Content Creators by Jens Lennartsson
#2: 8 tips to increase your conversation rate by Alex Garcia

Other Growth Currency⚡ Resources:

→ The Ultimate Creator Database of Awesomeness
→ How To Start, Grow, and Optimize a Thriving Newsletter Community

Again, thinking of Ukraine as the war persists. Please consider the links below.

🇺🇦 Support Ukraine:

Come Back Alive || Ukrainian Red Cross || Voices of Children || Ukraine-Russia Twitter List (h/t Noah Smith)

Peace and platonic love,

Dylan